Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11150. Parenting teenagers in the faith is one of the most anxious seasons many Christian parents go through, because the confident faith you could shape almost single handed in a five year old suddenly meets a teenager’s own opinions, friends, doubts and independence, all at once. I have pastored a great many families through…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11118. Postures of prayer vary widely across Scripture, and that variety itself is instructive, because it tells us that God has not bound genuine prayer to a single required physical position. Standing, kneeling, sitting, lying face down, hands raised, eyes lifted or lowered, all of these appear in the biblical record, offered by faithful…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11117. Fasting in secret is the standard Jesus sets for His disciples, and it is one of those instructions that sounds simple until you actually try to live it out among people who inevitably notice when you are not eating. Matthew 6:16-18 gives the clearest teaching on this question anywhere in Scripture, and it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11116. Fasting and health are not competing concerns, whatever the intensity of some fasting teaching can suggest. Your body was made by God and belongs to Him, and caring for it wisely while fasting is not a lack of spiritual seriousness. It is simply taking seriously another thing Scripture plainly teaches: that the body…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11115. The length of fasting is nowhere fixed by Scripture as a single required duration, which frustrates believers looking for a straightforward rule but also frees the practice from becoming a legalistic box to tick. The Bible records fasts lasting anywhere from a single meal skipped in genuine distress to forty days of complete…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11114. Scripture describes several genuinely distinct types of fasting, and knowing the differences between them will help you approach the discipline with realistic expectations rather than simply assuming every fast recorded in the Bible looked and functioned the same way. I want to walk through the main categories Scripture actually records in some detail,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11112. Biblical meditation is one of those phrases that makes some Christians nervous, because the word “meditation” calls to mind crossed legs, emptied minds and Eastern religion. Yet meditation is a thoroughly biblical idea, commanded and commended throughout Scripture, and it is something quite different from what the word usually suggests today. So I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1191. Reading Psalms well requires a different approach from reading Paul’s letters or the Gospels, since the Psalms were composed as poetry for prayer and worship rather than as doctrinal exposition, and treating them as though they were straightforward propositional teaching misses much of what they were actually written to do. I want to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11113. lectio divina, Latin for divine reading, is an old monastic practice of slow, meditative Scripture reading that has found its way back into evangelical conversation in recent years, and the question raised is whether Christians should actually practise it. My answer is a careful yes, with real guardrails firmly in place, because the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11111. Christian journalling is the practice of writing down what God is teaching us, what we are praying, and how we are responding to His Word, and it raises a fair question. Is keeping a journal a genuinely biblical practice, or is it just a modern self-help habit dressed in Christian clothes? I want…